ABSTRACT
“Early Infotainment in Broadcast and Film” profiles personalities who contributed to the development of broadcast, which later superseded the role of print as the press’ primary form of information delivery. It describes the competition that fueled the development of new radio and television technologies—how point-to-point (or person-to-person) communication later became content consumed by millions of listeners and viewers. It concludes with a description of the way artistic creations of Orson Welles, a visionary producer, used media—first theater, then radio, then film—to help create a new entertainment-based landscape for the press to navigate. Using materials from this chapter, students should know how broadcast’s technological innovations affected the storytelling techniques of the press. They should be able to describe how individual inventors built upon the successes of one another to create the modern radio and television industries; and they should recognize the roots of contemporary mass communication—including uses of social media—as extensions of the work produced by these pioneers. Key words, names, and phrases associated with Chapter 10 and the readings it references include: Broadcasting and infotainment; Guglielmo Marconi, Lee de Forest, and Howard Armstrong; RCA and NBC (David Sarnoff) and CBS (William Paley); and Orson Welles, “The War of the Worlds,” and Citizen Kane.
